Emotional Reactions and Moral Judgment: The Effects of Morally Challenging Interactions in Military Operations

‘A band of brothers’—an exploration of the range of medical ethical issues faced by British senior military clinicians on deployment to Afghanistan: a qualitative study

“…Exposure to ethically challenging situations is inevitable because of the increased complexity of today's military operations 1. The Ministry of Defence recognises that supporting deploying clinical personnel with appropriate ethical training is an essential educational requirement 2.…”

Interpreting ethical challenges in military operations

“…These results suggest that next to the proposed dimensions of moral intensity by Jones (1991) there are other factors that play a part in the assessment of overall moral intensity. For example, De Graaff, et al, (2016b) already pointed at the effect of different types of interaction on emotional reactions in ethically challenging situations. In short, it is possible that the authentic critical incidents used in this study focus on different features that contribute to the overall perception of moral intensity but are not incorporated in the intensity dimensions.…”

“…In order to cope with those feelings, recent research indicates that servicemen may verbally demonstrate various mechanisms of moral disengagement (cf. De Graaff, Schut, Verweij, Vermetten & Giebels, 2016b;Grassiani, 2012). Moral disengagement is a psychological mechanism that individuals use to dissociate themselves from what they believe is unethical conduct and to justify their own actions (Bandura, 1999).…”

“…Markers that highlighted key aspects of the construct, were drawn from the responses of the pilot study. This coding guide was also used in previous research (see : De Graaff et al, 2016b). First, two transcripts were independently labeled in terms of moral identity remarks and moral disengagement strategies by all three raters and jointly discussed afterwards.…”

“…From a previously collected sample of 45 interviews conducted with servicemen regarding their deployment experiences (De Graaff et al, 2016b), twelve narratives including an ethical challenge were selected (see Table 16 for a short description of the narratives). The content of the narratives show an appropriate distribution across four different types of ethical challenges encountered in the mission area (cf.…”